New!  Vaginal Birth enhances brain development compared to  Caesarean Delivery 

New!  Dystocia in Nulliparous Women. Preventing labour arrest in first-time moms

New! Pregnant in America YouTube clip

New!  Delivery by Caesarean increases risk of food allergy in children

Epidurals: real risks for mother and baby
by Dr Sarah Buckley

Epidurals are promoted as the 'Cadillac of pain relief' but their risks are not as well publicized. Epidurals interfere with the physiology of birth, and can cause side-effects, some of which are life-threatening, for the mother. The drugs used go straight to the baby, and to the baby's brain. Effects on newborns have been documented for at least six weeks after birth ...read entire article

Pain in labour
by Dr Sarah Buckley

The process of labour is amazingly complex but superbly coordinated by a birthing woman's natural chemical messengers- her hormones. These include oxytocin, the hormone of love, endorphins, the body's natural pain killers, adrenaline and noradrenalin, hormones of excitement, and prolactin, the mothering hormone. We can improve our chance of a good and safe experience of birth through respecting, and working with, these hormones in labour and birth ...read entire article

The Pain of Labour
by Andrea Robertson

Pain in labour is universal: it hurts to give birth. Since this is such a common experience it could be seen as comforting, a bond among women, a fundamental truth that confirms our special biological role and affirms the importance of our contribution to society. More often, however, it is seen as a blight, an unnecessary imposition, an affliction we must bear as the price for bearing children. This view, bolstered by the perception that pain is a symptom of disease and illness, has enabled medical men to convince us that pain is dispensable during birth, and is of no value, an evil to be cured with modern treatments and technology ...read entire article

Posterior Labor: A Pain in the Back
by Valerie El Halta

I have become increasingly frustrated and angry that posterior position and its ensuing complications in labor and delivery account for an inordinate number of caesareans. Many of the women who come to us desiring VBACs have suffered a previous cesarean for "failure to progress" and "cephalopelvic disproportion" (CPD). Yet when we preview the women's records, the post-operative diagnosis usually confirms a posterior position. . .My experience is that with appropriate diagnosis, this condition can be corrected with minimal intervention by assisting the baby to rotate. . . read entire article

Pushing for First-Time Moms
by Gloria Lemay

It actually amazes me to see multips being shouted at to "push, push, push" on the televised births on A Baby Story. My experience is that midwives must do everything they can to slow down the pushing in multips because the body is so good at expelling those second, third and fourth babies. In most cases with multips, having the mother do the minimum pushing possible will result in a nice intact perineum. As far as direction from the midwife goes, first babies are a different matter. I am not saying they need to be pushed out forcefully or worked hard on. Rather, I say they require more time and patience on the part of the midwife, and a smooth birth requires a dance to a different tune  ...read entire article

The Active Management of Labour
by Marsden Wagner

Active management illustrates the confusion in the medical approach as to what is normal and what is pathological in birth. The source of much of the confusion over normality found in medicalized birth is the mistaken idea that labour is something that happens to women rather than something women do (Rothman 1993). It is this idea which allows doctors to think they can intervene in what is happening rather than to assist the woman in what she is doing. Thus, it becomes the active management of labour, not the active management of women. Accordingly, the task for the woman becomes not to give birth but to learn to cope with what is happening to her. It is this line of thinking which results in an extraordinary distortion of the definition of "normal" birth. In reporting their perinatal statistics, the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, where active management originated, defines labour as normal even when it includes one or more of the following invasive interventions: amniotomy, induction, augmentation, epidural block, and/or episiotomy ...read entire article

Birth, Love and Death
by Nick Owen

It is a well-known fact that the template for a child's psychological development is laid down in earliest infancy. But did you ever consider that the experience of being born sets up the most fundamental predispositions and life reaction patterns we have? Our journey from the unborn world, inside our mothers, out into the big wide world of normal reality is the biggest transition we will ever make. What happens then, and how we react to those events, will stay with us for life ...read entire article

Outcomes of planned home births versus planned hospital births after regulation of midwifery in British Columbia" from The Centre for Community Health and Health Evaluation Research, BC Research Institute for Children's and Women's Health; the Department of Midwifery, Children's and Women's Health Centre of British Columbia; and the Departments of Family Practice, Obstetrics & Gynecology and Pediatrics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Interpretation: There was no increase in maternal or neonatal risk associated with planned homebirth under the care of a regulated midwife. However, women who gave birth at home attended by a midwife had fewer interventions during labour compared with women who gave birth in hospital attended by a physician ...read entire paper

E.coli infections on rise among newborns
The use of antibiotics [for treatment of Group-B strep] appears to have caused a shift in infections among premature infants in the United States, a new study suggests.

Researchers found E. coli infections had doubled during the 1990s while the rate of group B streptococcus blood infections fell by nearly three-quarters. Health officials are worried because E. coli can be more deadly than streptococcus ...read entire paper

What is RSV Disease?
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common respiratory virus in infants and young children. About 70% of children will contract RSV by the time they are one year old and nearly all children will have had it before they are two. For most, it's no worse than the common cold, but for babies with high risk factors, RSV can lead to a serious lung infection, and is the leading cause of pneumonia and bronchiolitis in infants. Approximately 90,000 children, most of them younger than six months, are hospitalized with RSV disease each year in the United States; about 2% of these children die ...read entire paper